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About Josh

Josh Samford has been the head-writer and owner of his website Varied Celluloid since 2003. He currently lives in the New Orleans area.

The Korean Cinema Conference

Co-Host of the VCinema podcast and all around classy gentleman Rufus was responsible for creating the website for the Korean Cinema Conference based out of New York. A workshop/conference on everything to deal with Korean cinema, this should be a tremendous occasion for Korean film fans within the NY area. Taking place between November 11-14th, 2010, if you have the means to take part in the event we highly encourage you to do so! Our good friend Rufus is also going to be on one of the focus panels as well, so if you go make sure to stop in and say hi! You can read the official press release for the event after the jump!

Korean Cine-Media and the Transnational

An International Conference Presented by
Department of Cinema Studies
New York University

This project is a four day intensive workshop-cum-conference on the transnational dimension of Korean cinema. First of its kind, eighteen renowned scholars from Japan, Korea, England, and the U.S. have confirmed their participation, representing therefore a diverse range of disciplines such as Literature, Arts, History, Cultural Studies, Area Studies, Media Studies, Anthropology, and Cinema Studies. Additionally, there will be two focus discussion panels, co-organized with the Korea Society, featuring a number of industry experts, critics, fans, and film festival curators.

The conference is titled Korean Cine-media and the Transnational, and it is so named with a three-fold objective. Firstly, it foregrounds the contested notions of national culture and national cinema only to probe their validity in an increasingly confounding cultural milieu of the world. Secondly, it employs the concept of “cine-media” both to question the durability of cinema as a self-sufficient medium and to place it within an intricate loop of popular media-scapes. Lastly, it sets off a contrapuntal play between Korean (national) cine-media and the transnational in order to examine the multivalent connections that they maintain with each other.

While the thematic focus is on Korean cinema, the conceptual scope of the conference espouses any theoretical/analytic frameworks pertinent to the case of cultural transnationalization. Accordingly, the conference is concerned neither with “Korea/n” nor with “film” in hermetically enclosed and finalized senses. Instead, it refutes any ethnocentric insistence upon cultural distinctiveness, ownership, and authorship. Hence, “Korean cinema” signifies a particular geo-cultural platform located within an expanding grid of traveling cultures, a site of filmic production wherein intensely transnationalized/ing socio-cultural components are reorganized in response to shifting domestic, regional, and international demands.

With these orientations, the conference will be structured around four main sections/areas: 1) history 2) theory 3) political economy of production and 4) cultural and textual practices.

First, the history section aims to re-view and reiterate the historical trajectories of Korean cine-media from a standpoint that underscores transnational interfaces and interactions. Its scope stretches from colonial periods through the golden age of Korean cinema and all the way to the post-Cold war conjuncture, with a prospect to register historical momenta that have either undermined or encouraged specific modes of trans-cultural production and consciousness.

Second, the theory section harnesses the oxymoronic juxtaposition between the transnational and Korean cine-media. It aims to make theoretical interventions into increasingly prosaic discussions of globalization (and post-nationalization) by interjecting the conceptual energy of the transnational in the context of the ever-deterritorializing cine-media of Korea in particular and East Asia in general.

Third, the political economy section seeks to uncover correlations between state policies/laws and production practices to ascertain how cinematic (and other popular media) trans-nationalization has waxed and waned or shaped and unshaped along the vicissitude of political economic milieux. It will focus on how macro/micro alignments across capital, market, state, and artistic agents give rise and respond to such critical occurrences as the screen quota movements, East Asian co-productions during/after the Cold war, neo-liberal economy and deregulations on Japanese cultural products.

Fourth, the cultural and textual practices section attempts to map the reception of Korean cinema in broader cultural and media climates that have been formulated nationally, transnationally, regionally, and globally. We foreground interpretive, affective, and consumptive actions of domestic/international audiences and institutions: their significance as the pacesetters who determine specific cultural currents and templates of our time, and the roles they played in the formation of such phenomena as fan-subbing, translation, pastiche, celebrities, digital piracy and so forth.’